On Friday 3rd June, unauthorised entry was gained to our Codemasters.comwebsite. As soon as the intrusion was detected, we immediately tookcodemasters.com and associated web services offline in order to preventany further intrusion.

During the days since the attack we have conducted a thoroughinvestigation in order to ascertain the extent and scope of the breachand have regrettably discovered that the intruder was able to gainaccess to the following:

Codemasters.com website

Access to the Codemasters corporate website and sub-domains.

DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page

Access to the DiRT 3 VIP code redemption page.

The Codemasters EStore

We believe the following have been compromised: Customer names andaddresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, encrypted passwords andorder history. Please note that no personal payment information wasstored with Codemasters as we use external payment providers, meaningyour payment details were not at risk from this intrusion.

Codemasters CodeM database

Members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth,encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered byusers, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox LiveGamertags are all believed to have been compromised.

Whilst we do not have confirmation that any of this data was actuallydownloaded onto an external device, we have to assume that, as accesswas gained, all of these details were compromised and/or stolen.

The Codemasters.com website will remain offline for the foreseeablefuture with all Codemasters.com traffic re-directed to the CodemastersFacebook page instead. A new website will launch later in the year.

Advice

For your security, in the first instance we advise you to change anypasswords you have associated with other Codemasters accounts. If youuse the same login information for other sites, you should change thatinformation too. Furthermore, be extra cautious of potential scams, viaemail, phone, or post that ask you for personal or sensitiveinformation. Please note that Codemasters will never ask you for anypayment data such as credit card numbers or bank account details, norwill Codemasters ask you for passwords or other personal identifyingdata. Be aware too of fraudulent emails that may outwardly appear to befrom Codemasters with links inviting you to visit websites. The safestway to visit your favourite websites is always by typing in the addressmanually into the address bar of your browser.

Unfortunately, Codemasters is the latest victim in on-going targetedattacks against numerous game companies. We assure you that we are doingeverything within our legal means to track down the perpetrators andtake action to the full extent of the law.

Their server was hacked apparently & they said "The server contained no consumer / user information. The protection of our customer information is our utmost priority." Nintendo has fixed it by all accounts & said 'We constantly monitor our security."

In February a man from Spain was arrested to do with a Nintendo gaming attack where 4000 or so users details were stolen. This was mentioned on the BBC News Technology website.